I thought about the small group of friends and mentors who have helped me to explore the darker corners of the soul through poetry, which is one of the functions of the lyric. Or, to put it another way, I thought about how friendship has helped me speak to both the pleasures and pains that constitute a life…

Read Henri Cole’s Paris Diary, Part VI: http://nyr.kr/XJQvll

(Source: newyorker.com)

Carolyn Kormann on the erotic poetry of John Donne, “a great visitor of ladies” and “a great writer of conceited verses”: http://nyr.kr/Z0oUxQ

“Most educated people can name half a dozen poets who are more famous for their messy lives and deaths than for their poems… The narratives endure because they align with the popular understanding of what it is to be an artist.”

Sarah Manguso writes about Sylvia Plath, who died fifty years ago today, and looks at the changing way we talk about mental illness: http://nyr.kr/1576DDa

Photograph: Contrasto/Redux.

(Source: newyorker.com)

“It’s hard to imagine the author of “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”—the watcher of trees and grass, of frozen lakes and forested darkness—pinning up political posters in a crowded San Francisco bar. But, while the personality that comes through in Frost’s poems was a genuine one, it was also edited…”

Yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of Robert Frost’s death. Here, Joshua Rothman looks at the poet’s two sides: http://nyr.kr/VSHmr5

Photograph: Library of Congress.

“We may be even more alive than we understand…”

Michael McClure on his poem in this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/UNTuYm

Photograph: Wikimedia Commons

Pondering the flowers this week—with their complex shadings of blue—in all the flower shops of Paris, I have been reminded of how short life is but also of how tough and durable we are as humans…

Henri Cole’s Paris Diary, Part III: http://nyr.kr/SaHHnp